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Comment: Cover has light wear to the edges and corners. Binding tight. Pages clean and unmarked.

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One of the greatest epic poems of the Italian Renaissance, Orlando Furioso is an intricate tale of love and enchantment set at the time of the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne's conflict with the Moors. When Count Orlando returns to France from Cathay with the captive Angelica as his prize, her beauty soon inspires his cousin Rinaldo to challenge him to a duel - but during their battle, Angelica escapes from both knights on horseback and begins a desperate quest for freedom. This dazzling kaleidoscope of fabulous adventures, sorcery and romance has inspired generations of writers - including Spenser and Shakespeare - with its depiction of a fantastical world of magic rings, flying horses, sinister wizardry and barbaric splendour.

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I may not have been the only person to have noticed how much the poetry improves in the last half of _Paradiso_ in the Dorothy Sayers translation. This is because Sayers died before completing the last of her translation of the _Divina Commedia_, and her devoted friend and admirer Barbara Reynolds took over. But where Sayers had been technically impressive in matching Dante's terza rima, but pedestrian in the poetry, at the point where (as I guess) Reynolds takes over a new lightness of touch and poetic feel for the language makes itself felt.This Ariosto translation is Reynolds' great achievement. Moreover it is one of the three or four greatest literary translations in English, an achievement to stand beside Dryden's _Aeniad_ and Fairfax's _Gerusalemma Liberata_. (On Pope's _Illiad_, which I'm currently reading, I tend to agree with the contemporary reviewer who commented, "A very pretty poem, Mr Pope, but you must not call it Homer".)She captures Ariosto's wit and lightness, occasionally turning in closing couplets for her stanzas that are as sharp as Byron's in _Don Juan_ (who was in turn also using Ariosto - among others - as a model), but also following Ariosto in allowing the sense to flow from stanza to stanza in a quite un-Byronic way. As well, she manages to transmit Ariosto's graver passages in equally dignified verse, for example some of the set pieces imitated (by Ariosto) from Homer. English readers tend to think of Ottava Rima as a vehicle for comic verse, but in Italian it is a model for epic. It's just that the great Italian epic tradition, unlike the English epic tradition before Byron's great anti-epic, includes humour.Read more ›

This renaissance romance combines elements of the adventure story along the lines of J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy with satire in the tradition of Lucien, Ben Jonson, and Jonathan Swift. Barbara Reynolds' verse translation is well paced, easy to read, and displays a rich use of language. Be aware, though, that this is a two volume translation and the catalog, as of 1-9-97, shows only the first volume is available from Amazon. The prose translation from Oxford University Press is complete in one volume, but is not as easy to read in that it suffers from very small print and a language that is not as vigorous as that of the Reynold's translation.J. D. Wilson, Jr.

Ariosto was one of the giants of Renaissance literature, and this was his footprint. Grand, touching, funny, witty, stirring -- as Dryden said of Chaucer, here is the world's plenty. Some of the greatest poets of the next two centuries (Tasso, Spenser, Milton) explicitly attempted to overdo him, and only sometimes succeeded; Byron took as much from Ariosto as he did from Pulci.But don't read this on that account. Read it because it's a delight from start to finish. War, love, and chivalry are the poet's themes, and they're here in all their forms.I don't know Italian, but everyone I've asked who would know assures me Reynolds's translation captures not just the essence but the spirit of the original.(Ignore the reviews that claim that this is a prose translation -- they are from another translation.)

I would have loved to have had the two volumes of this wonderful work on my Kindle, but ten minutes after downloading them I returned them for credit. They have no Table of Contents and almost no navigation marks for the five-way controller (or whatever the equivalent is on the keyless models), so forget about browsing. Even more disappointing is that the entire poem (not just the quotes in the introduction, which is all you get to see in the sample) has been set with a wide left margin, a huge waste of space that also causes lines to wrap unnecessarily. And when they wrap, they wrap to the same margin, which is just ugly.

Formatting narrative verse for the Kindle is really not difficult: you just create a paragraph style flush-left with a hanging indent. How can Penguin, a large publishing company with many Kindle editions, not know or care?

For that matter, it would make sense to combine the two books into a single e-book, for ease of searching on (for example) the names of the many characters. There's no reason not to do this on a device that never gets fatter. But here, as in so many cases, we get the impression that the Kindle edition is just a careless afterthought.

My rating is for the Kindle edition only. Unlike David Slavitt, who treats the poem as little more than a silly romp, Reynolds does full justice to its rich textures, not only in her learned yet very readable translation but in her prefaces and notes. The useful apparatus in the printed volumes includes running heads that summarize the action, detailed indexes that give a quick reminder of what the many characters have been up to, and even schematics of some of the battles and jousts. In paperback, this is a five-star production in every way.